A new path for UAlbany

Our opinion: A new vision for UAlbany underscores what more it can do.

Public-private partnership. Suddenly that’s a lot more than a catch phrase in the jargon of government and academia. It describes what’s going on at the University of Albany, where a proposed $165 million expansion will require both state and private money — and could reap benefits that will extend beyond the sprawling campus, and even the city whose name and destiny it shares.

The Emerging Technology and Entrepreneurship Complex is of primarily academic importance, of course. UAlbany’s offerings in atmospheric and environmental sciences, biomedical and biotechnology studies, forensic science and cybersecurity, and advanced data and analytics would be more expansive and enticing than ever.

But this is also about the economic significance of having a state university center in a region that seems to be more serious than ever about creating good jobs. The impact of 187 new faculty members, 355 more researchers and an extra 193 campus support jobs is enormous — so much so that we’ll leave it to the whiz kids studying econometrics to put a value on it. The university’s early estimate is $1.8 billion.

All this is also expected to mean 1,350 more students at UAlbany by 2017, many of them minorities and many of them beneficiaries of a bigger budget for financial aid.

The university’s identity has never been more pronounced, if more narrow. UAlbany’s new president, Robert Jones, who takes office Jan. 2, will inherit a clear mission: quality education in the fields of the emerging sciences.

That’s somewhat troubling to a visible and distinguished constituency justifiably worried that excellence in technology and science will come at the expense of the university’s ability to still offer quality education in the humanities and liberal arts.

But it fits in with Governor Cuomo’s shrewd thinking, that the major SUNY branches should be catalysts of economic resurgence in parts of New York that so sorely need it. The word on the UAlbany campus, in fact, is that this plan was largely ready a year ago, but had to be refined to better fit the governor’s larger SUNY2020 agenda. Approval now should be a formality.

That’s not to say there isn’t more that UAlbany might have proposed. The primary question may be this: Why can’t such an ambitious university, and specifically its infrastructure, include a substantial reinvestment in the very uptown neighborhood that UAlbany students have helped turn into a textbook case of a student ghetto?

The political intrigue over the yearlong delay in pushing ahead with this plan is thickened by reports that UAlbany officials had initially considered proposing just that. It’s a glaring omission. A university on the verge of greater prominence — thanks to partnerships with private businesses that will both invest in the technology and entrepreneurship center and subsequently hire their share of the graduates — has more work to do off-campus.

What has been proposed, however, is worthy of genuine excitement. We would like to get caught up in even more of it, including partnerships that involve expansion and improvement in other academic fields, and in the city at the university’s door.